Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Transmetropolitan: the 90s comic that... Translation Tuesday: excerpt from A C...

Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including a novel so overwhelming it made a reader cry, a Harry Potter challenge and must-read ancient Greek and Roman authors.

“Alright George Eliot!! .... Show me what you got,” says ihath, who is getting ready to devour Middlemarch:

Can any novel be capable of overwhelming serenity? Yes

Barack Obama’s admiration for Marilynne Robinson was such that when he was in Iowa in September of last year he made a point of seeking her out and having a little chat. I share his admiration. I finished Gilead last night. It made me cry – only the second time that’s ever happened to me. Can any novel be capable of overwhelming serenity? Yes. Finding the thought of turning to another work of fiction absurd I will ease my way down from Gilead’s empyrean heights with The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-making in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz. That will return me to our prosaic world without too much regret at having placed on the shelf one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.

I have read the first two books in the past but did not enjoy them. But I have made it my goal to finish the series this year, so this month I am starting by reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

... and am enjoying it more than I thought I would and I’m only a couple of pages in. I’m curious if any of you have other favourite ancient Greek and Roman authors or writers from Late Antiquity, or ones you particularly dislike. Among my favourites are Herodotus, Ammianus Marcellinus, published by Penguin as The Later Roman Empire AD 354-378 (who was an absolute joyful revelation and was probably responsible for the beginning of my love affair with Late Antiquity), Tacitus, of course, Seutonius, Procopius’s The Secret History. On the other hand, no matter how many times I read Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War, I can’t get away from the impression I’m reading about Lilliputians.